This picture was taken in 1996 on December 31st, in Tacoma, WA, near the home of the bride.

The happy couple: Trish and Jos Backus

Code

• qmail checkpassword replacement
  This Perl-based package implements virtual POP domains for qmail. It is in production at a number of sites and its current form has gone without major changes for quite a while, so I consider it to be fairly stable. If you pick it up, I’d like to hear what you think of it. Suggestions for improvement are welcome, of course.

MD5 (vqpop.tar.gz) = f6ed350b22ae6216756d6f777140b979

Last updated on December 11th, 1997.

• dirwatch watches a directory (or file) and runs a command when the directory (or file) is written to. Uses the FreeBSD kqueue(2) mechanism. The day after I wrote this, sysutils/wait_on was committed to the FreeBSD ports tree, which does more or less the same thing.
  • Makefile
  • dirwatch.c

• xxd.rb is a reimplementation in Ruby of most of the xxd utility that ships with vim.

• openfiles.rb is a Ruby script to list files remotely opened, analogous to the query option of the Windows openfiles command. It demonstrates the use of the Win32API module.

• continuation-example.rb demonstrates the use of continuations and exceptions in Ruby. In this example they are used together to handle the reporting of errors in the caller of a set of nested method calls. The example is purposefully kept simple to increase its tutorial value.

• dnsnotify.pl is a Perl script used to send DNS NOTIFY packets to slave DNS content servers that implement the NOTIFY protocol, such as BIND. dns-notify is a Ruby version which requires a patched version of Net::DNS

• A patch for OpenSSH-3.4p1 which adds a configurable backoff/retry capability to the ssh client. This is useful when running many ssh sessions in paralllel (e.g. when doing remote updates). Some of the ssh sessions will fail because ssh-agent can only service so many requests per second. This patch allows one to specify the maximum number of retries as well as the maximum delay between each retry attempt.

After applying the patch, see the README.agent-retry-patch file for details on how to use it.

• A patch to OpenPackages make to make it treat $^ as $>. This improves compatibility with GNU make and thus the number of Makefiles it can interpret.

• A Ruby version of Sam Varshavchik’s Net::CIDR module (version 0.11) for Perl. Successfully executes the examples from the docs; test program here. Not sure about the license.

Music (made with Reason)

• Forgotten Memories
• Red Flame
• Delayed Arrival
• Mysterious Grace
• Some Other Time, Some Other Place
• Splendid Amazon
• Western Horizons
• A New End
• Jam
• One More Thing
• What Lies Beyond
• Trance Dance
• Symbolic
• Walk Away
• Too Late

Some of my music is available on TheSixtyOne .